A Nazi Let This Harmless Maid Inside His House. He Didn’t Know She Was There to Kill Him.

6 min readWilhelm Kube, a Nazi general in occupied Belarus, was assassinated in 1943 by Yelena Mazanik, a maid who planted a bomb under his mattress after infiltrating his Minsk home as a Soviet operative.Kube, a former journalist who wrote nationalist plays, became a brutal administrator whose cruelty—including ordering the liquidation of a children’s ghetto—made him a target for multiple Soviet assassination operations.Mazanik and two fellow operatives were secretly awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union in 1943, though their heroism remained classified until after World War II ended.Wilhelm Kube, a German journalist and general secretary of the Berlin chapter of the German National People’s Party during the Weimar Republic, wrote a stage play in 1920 about the 6th-century king of the Ostrogoths, Totila. Its reception was muted; the appetite for nationalist nostalgic material in the aftermath of the Great War was niche. But within three years of writing it, Kube found a political movement springing up in Germany that aligned with the ideology he’d tried to embed in his play: Nazism.By 1933, Kube was a member of the Prussian State Council, appointed by then-Prussian Minister-President Hermann Göring. Kube decided it was time to revive his play, staging a production of it in Schneidemühl, Prussia. It was during this production that he met and married an actress, Anita, who played one of the lead roles. Beyond bonding over a love of the theatre, Anita “shared her husband’s views on[...]the racial ideology of the Nazis.”Wikimedia CommonsGeneralkommissar Wilhelm KubeKube would stage his play again in Minsk, Belarus, this time without his wife in the lead role, in 1942. A review of that particular production, in the German-language newspaper Minsker Zeitung, survives today. It dismissed Kube’s play as the “work of politicians and propagandists.” But at that point, reviews hardly mattered any more. After all, Kube was now Generalkommissar of western Belarus, and politics and propaganda were part of the job, along with suppressing local partisan acts of resistance. At their lavish home in Minsk, Anita “hosted cultural evenings, at which also Belarusian singers took part,” and boasted that their household staff, including several “Hausjuden,” or “House Jews,” would affectionately call her husband “protector.”Within a year of the 1942 staging of Totila, Wilhelm Kube would be dead, the target of a rarity in the Second World War: a successful assassination attempt on a Nazi officer.The assassination would be carried out by one of Kube’s house servants.The Housemaid & Operation PlaywrightHeritage Images//Getty ImagesA painting depicts the assassination of Reinhard HeydrichThe successful assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich by Czech and Slovak soldiers in June 1942 provided a morale boost to partisan resistance efforts across occupied Europe, showing how a small, organized group could strike a blow against the Nazi war machine.For Wilhelm Kube, however, the death of Heydrich may have actually brought some sense of relief as well. Heydrich had been a hindrance to Kube’s own ascension in the party several times. In the 1930s, Kube had gotten into a dispute with Heydrich over an ethics investigation (including accusations of corruption and adultery) which led to Kube’s ejection from the Party.Heinrich Himmler eventually saw to it that Kube returned, eventually resulting in his appointment as Generalkommissar in Minsk. But Kube’s idiosyncratic form of racial prejudice put him in Heydrich’s crosshairs once more. Kube was a virulent anti-semite, but unlike many of his Nazi peers, Kube had an internal hierarchy for Jews of different nationalities. As he laid out in a December 16, 1941 letter, he viewed German Jews as superior to, for example, Russian Jews in their “personal cleanliness” and work skills.“I am certainly a hard man and willing to help solve the Jewish question,” he wrote to Gauleiter Hinrich Lohse in Latvia, “but people who come from our own cultural sphere, just are not the same as the brutish hordes in this place.” Initially, Kube tried to spare German Jews the same fate as others, resulting in an SS complaint that “Generalkommissar Kube appears to have promised to the German Jews, who before my time were delivered to the ghetto five thousand strong, that life and health would remain theirs.” It was Reinhard Heydrich who flew out to Minsk to ultimately reprimand Kube and get him to toe the party line.ullstein bild Dtl.//Getty ImagesA 1933 photograph depicts, from left to right: Wilhelm Kube, Wilhelm Frick (seated), Hans Kerrl, Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, Richard Walter Darre, Heinrich Himmler, and Rudolf HessThe pressure worked. Kube’s actions in 1942 and 1943 arguably moved beyond the “banality of evil” into a deliberate show of cruelty for the purpose of career security. One incident that appears to have shocked Soviet officials who received reports about it involved the “liquidation” of a children’s home in the Minsk ghetto to the accompaniment of accordion music being played to drown out the screams of the roughly 300 children. Kube arrived to see that the bodies had been tossed into a pit. When he noticed that some of the children were still alive, he reached into his pocket and removed a handful of candy, which he tossed to them before ordering the pit filled in, burying all within.The Soviets were so determined to see Kube killed that assassination orders were delivered to more than a dozen groups, with operations launched under names such as “Boar,” “Owl,” and one that fit the Nazi officer’s artistic ventures: “Playwright.” There was even an attempt to take out the Generalkommissar at the Yanka Kupala National Academic Theatre in Minsk. Kube managed to evade the attack despite the fact that it left the building “severely damaged.”Yelena Mazanik, a child of Belarusian peasants, was ultimately the one who succeeded in killing Kube, thanks in part to being underestimated by the arrogant Nazi himself. When Mazanik was recruited to work as a maid at the Generalkommissar’s Minsk home, she was working as a waitress at a dining hall. What the Nazis didn’t know was that Mazanik, the wife of NKVD agent Boleslav Tarletsky, had already infiltrated a Wehrmacht unit to gather information under the assumed name Galina.Wikimedia CommonsMariya OsipovaOnce Mazanik began working in the Kube home, a fellow maid by the name of Tatyana Kalita brought her to a group of partisans focused on assassinating Wilhelm. Among them were Soviet intelligence officer Nadezhda Troyan (under the alias Kanskaya) and Belarusian partisan Mariya Osipova. Mazanik hesitated at first, agreeing to the plot only after bringing in her sister Valentina to confirm that Osipova was a partisan and not a Nazi mole.The partisans arranged an escape route for Mazanik and her sister, to be used once the deed was done. Now they had to settle on the deed itself. Poison was, at first, proposed as the most practical means, but Mazanik objected, fearing that the children in the home might accidentally receive a dose. So it was ultimately decided that Osipova would procure a time bomb and that Mazanik would smuggle it inside under her clothes.Getting the bomb past the Nazi guards would prove surprisingly easy. They didn’t even search the unassuming maid. Mazanik normally worked on the home’s third floor. Now she had to get down to Kube’s private chambers on the second and find a place to plant the bomb.Totila, the Ostrogoth king who inspired Kube’s play, died on a battlefield in 552. According to Procopius in The Wars, during the Battle of Taginae, Totila and his forces charged the Byzantines with only spears. The Gepaedes warrior Asbadus, a defector from the Goths, drove his spear through Totila’s back, while a youth of Totila’s household exclaimed, “What is this, you dog? Are you rushing to smite your own master?” Totila survived for eighty-four stades (15,540 meters or just under 10 miles) before succumbing to his injuries.Kube, in contrast, died in his sleep on September 22, 1943. Mazanik had placed the bomb under his mattress, and it exploded in the early morning hours. Kube died instantly. Mazanik was gone long before the bomb went off, having left work early after feigning a toothache. The Nazis searched for her, but never found her. In the dark hours between October 11th and 12th, Yelena Mazanik, Maria Osipova, and Nadezhda Troyan boarded a plane at an airfield in Byahoml, Belarus and were taken to Moscow.On November 3, 1943 the three women were presented with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union in the Kremlin, though this was done in secret (for the first time ever) because the war was still ongoing and the women might carry out further secret missions. In retaliation for the assassination, the SS killed roughly 1,000 males in Minsk.Reportedly, in the upper echelons of the Nazi apparatus, Heinrich Himmler, the man who had overseen Kube’s return after his first ouster, privately called his death a “blessing” because he thought Kube’s rash behaviors and deviation from the Nazi party’s official ideology made him a liability.After the war, Mazanik’s heroism was made public, and the Hero of the Soviet Union lived out her days working for the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR until her death in 1996.Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.